Chapter Thirty-nine
Silas Shaw led his lame horse south, walking under the slamming heat of the merciless noon sun. His head ached and his lips were swollen and cracked under his skull mask. Nausea curled his belly like a green snake, but one thing he knew . . . one thing that kept him going . . . he’d meet up with the cur Nate Condor soon.
And then he’d kill him. And take what was rightfully his.
Around Shaw stretched a searing wasteland of sand, yucca, mesquite, and vast acres of tarbush. In the distance the mountains stood tall and silent, the abodes of the long winds that once cooled the old Comanche Trail. He figured he was hundreds of miles from the nearest white man, but neither knew that for sure nor cared.
His skin itched under the skull mask, but he was damned if he was going to take it off. He’d wear it when he gunned Condor; give him a foretaste of what he’d meet in hell.
Somewhere along the trail he’d lost his hat. He didn’t know when or how. He knew only that it was gone and he wasn’t going back for it. No time. He was catching up with good ol’ Nate, he was sure of that. The showdown was near.
Shaw stumbled and fell on all fours. He lay there for a while. His head felt like it had been split open by a wood axe and steel nails driven into his brain. Lightning flashed around him in vivid shades of scarlet, yellow, and dazzling white. His arm pained him like a nagging toothache.
He staggered to his feet again.
“Damn you, Condor!” Shaw yelled, spreading his arms wide. “You can’t hide from me. I’m coming after you.” For some reason he thought that very funny and laughed until his sides ached.
Then he walked on, the suffering horse dragging behind him.
When Shaw saw a wagon in the distance he thought he’d found Condor, He drew his gun and got ready. He dropped the horse’s reins and staggered toward the wagon, dragging his feet like a man wading through deep water.
He fell a couple of times and getting to his feet again was becoming a problem, but he managed to stagger on, his Colt up and ready.
When he reached the wagon, he dropped to a squatting position and smiled. “Well, hello you two.” His lips were swollen and cracked and his voice was thick.
Two skeletons, scraps of tattered clothing clinging to their bleached bones, sat side by side on the driving seat. One was a woman, parts of a blue prairie bonnet still covering her skull.
A strap-iron arrowhead was embedded in the man’s breastbone. The woman showed no sign of a wound that Shaw could see, but there had been one, he was sure of that. It looked like the couple had been dead for many years. Ten, twenty, a hundred. He didn’t know.
His left arm buzzed and his fingers tingled as he stood and stared at the skeletons, his skull mask making him one with them.
Shaw put the tip of his right forefinger to the wooden chin of his grotesque mask and said, “Now, my dears—may I call you . . . what can I call you? Ah, yes. How about Tom and Mary?”
The yellow skulls grinned at him.
“You like that? Well, jolly good. I was an entertainer, you know. I mean, on stage. I acted and sang and danced with my dear lady wife.”
Shaw cupped a hand to his ear. “What did you say, Mary? Oh, what kind of songs did I sing? Well, all kinds. My favorite? I don’t know. They were all my favorites.”
The woman’s skull grinned at him.
“I’ll sing you one. But my throat is dry and croaky, so you must forgive me. First I’ll sing you a little ditty I sang when I trod the boards of the music halls in London town. With the Prince of Wales, God bless him, in attendance, don’t you know.”
Shaw cavorted a little, kicking up puffs of sand, and then he sang.
“Champagne Charlie is my name,
Drinking champagne is my game.
I love to hear the corks go pop!
I love champagne and I’ll never stop.
“Hmm . . . those weren’t quite the words, were they? If my lady wife was here she’d set me right, never fear. Ah well, not to mind, Tom and Mary. Come sit down here with me and we’ll have a nice little chat.”
Shaw reached up and grabbed hold of the woman’s skeleton. Bones clattered onto the boards of the wagon as he lifted his bizarre burden and propped it against a wheel. He did the same for the man, but by the time he got the skeleton down, only the ribcage, spine, and skull were still connected.
Shaw sat on the sand. “Are we sitting comfortably? We are? Good. Now, Tom and Mary, let me tell you a story about a lowdown, thieving skunk by the name of English Nate Condor. Oh, by the way, you wouldn’t have a little water about your persons, would you? No? Well, it doesn’t matter. I’ll drink Condor’s water soon.”
Shaw smiled. “You’re both grinning at me. Is it because you like my mask? It makes us all look the same and that’s nice, don’t you think? It’s as though we’re all in this thing together.”
Pain stabbed through Shaw’s left arm and he felt as though an iron crab was crushing his chest. “Now, where was I?” he said, gasping. “Oh yes, I was about to tell you about that lowlife Nate Condor and his evil ways.”
The lifeless eye sockets of the skeletons stared at him, their teeth bared in grins that would end only when their bones turned to dust.
“Condor . . . he . . .” The pain in Shaw’s chest and arm reached a crescendo and there was a clamor in his head like the clanging clash of symbols.
All at once, the left side of his body died.
Shaw groaned and slumped onto the sand, aware of what had happened to him.
He’d once seen a man who’d had a stroke. One half of him was dead and useless, and he talked out of a corner of his mouth, stringing saliva, cursing God and the mother who’d borne him for his fate.
The man had been an English lord of high estate, but death is not impressed by wealth and title and had struck him down as it would any other man.
Shaw knew then in those awful moments that Nate Condor had won.
Unable to face that fact, unable to endure the prolonged death that awaited him, he reached for the gun at his hip. He moved the skull mask aside and shoved the muzzle of the revolver under his chin.
He pulled the trigger.
The racketing echoes of the shot hammered across the silent desert and the skeletons of Tom and Mary watched the dead man and grinned.
High overhead, the cold-eyed buzzards dipped lower.